GUNNED DOWN LIKE ANIMALS! blared the Daily Express of London, echoing the outrage in Germany over the shooting of Uwe-Wilhelm Rakebrand in Miami six days earlier. The back-to-back murders had Florida officials bracing for steep losses to their $30 billion-a-year tourism industry and rattled Americans, too. Disney stock fell by $1.50, and a spokesman in Los Angeles issued an official call for gun control. Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles, who donned a bulletproof vest to ride with cops in Miami, dispatched all the law-enforcement muscle he could find–including game wardens–to help guard the state’s highway rest stops. In Monticello, sheriff’s deputies, working on a vague description from Jagger, rounded up black teens with police records, pulling some out of school for questioning in the Colley case. But such measures only underscored the perception abroad that the land of the free had become the home of the depraved. As the German weekly Stern put it, “Murder belongs to the American way of life like Coca-Cola and hot dogs.”
For Americans benumbed to the violence surrounding them, the murders provided a reality check–a fresh reminder of the own vulnerability According to a report last wee homicide has replaced AIDS as the 10th leading cause of death among Americans, and it’s the second biggest killer of those age 15 to 24. The bloodshed is hardly limited to Florida. In New Orleans, where the body count averages more than one a day, the Abbey bar has set up a murder pool, taking bets on when the city’s 400th homicide of 1993 will take place. The public mood “is enormously frustrated and cynical, says Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg. “We can be followed home from the supermarket, followed when we rent a car…The tourist murders are so scary because they reinforce that sense that there is no protection, there is nothing you can do.”
That feeling was particularly rife in Miami, still reeling from the Rakebrand killing. Officials had made halting crimes against tourists a high priority in recent months, posting better highway signs, eliminating telltale Y and Z license plates from rental cars and beefing up robbery intervention patrols. Rental agencies have been handing out security pamphlets as well. Kathrin Rakebrand, four months pregnant, was reading one such brochure to her husband when their unmarked rental car was bumped from behind by a yellow van on the Dolphin Expressway, supposedly the safest route from the airport to Miami Beach. Uwe-Wilhelm Rakebrand kept driving, just as the brochure advised, but the van pulled alongside and someone fired a sawed-off .30-caliber rifle from the window. Kathrin grabbed the wheel as the car jumped the median and swerved into oncoming traffic, but her husband, hit in the back, was already dead.
Until that incident, attacks on tourists had been down in recent months. But crimes against residents have continued, with African-Americans at far greater risk than anyone else. Blacks make up 19 percent of the city’s population, and 55 percent of the 294 homicide victims who have come through the Greater Miami morgue this year-among them, a 17-year-old found slain on a basketball court and a 6-year-old hit by a bullet fired two blocks away. None of those crimes attracted much notice. “There seems to be an attitude, laced with racism, that if black people want to kill off one another, that’s their business,” A-rote The Miami Times, a black weekly.
In the Monticello area, which is 43 percent black, dismay turned to outrage last week over the random questioning of black teens. “Gestapo-like tactics!” cried the Rev. R. N. Gooden, president of the Florida chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “This is not the kind of police work utilized against the white community,” said Robyn Blummer of the Florida ACLU. Jefferson County Sheriff Ken Fortune countered: “We have a human being that was killed. Where the investigation goes, we don’t pick and choose.” But even Fortune seemed to forget, in the onrush of foreign camera crews, that violence afflicts local residents too. He erroneously proclaimed that Colley had been the county’s first murder of the year. A black resident had been fatally shot outside a bar Aug. 21.
At the weekend, police refused to comment on reports that two Monticello teens, 13 and 15, with long rap sheets, were suspects in the Colley case. The three black youths held in the Rakebrand murder were residents of Miami’s inner city, just a few miles and yet a world away from the soft sand and warm water of Miami Beach. Some black leaders said tourists were unfortunately paying the price for the lack of jobs, housing and hope in such areas. “You just can’t build a Chinese wall around the inner city. Eventually the monster escapes,” said H. T. Smith, a black lawyer and activist. Smith himself agrees that the dearth of opportunity scarcely excuses turning predatory-or gunning down motorists who fail to stop for no conceivable gain.
It was also hard to escape the conclusion that the prevalence of guns has given deadly force to the frustrations. The Washington-based Travel Industry Association of America joined Disney in calling for gun control. But there was no campaign from inside Florida. The toughest proposal now circulating would ban handguns for those under 18–unless they are used for hunting, gun classes or target shooting. Whether that would have any impact is debatable in a city like Miami, locked in its own urban arms race. “When I first came on the force, in ‘79, there were some 9 millimeters out there,” said one detective in Liberty City. “I took a guy down a couple months ago. He opened the door with a Glock. It had a 30-round clip and was mounted with a laser sight.”
Florida police and black leaders had one thing in common last week: the perception that the world woke up to the plague of violence only when foreigners were shot and tourism was threatened. But it wasn’t clear how long the outrage would last or if it would produce any solutions. By the weekend, tour operators were predicting that the strength of the pound and the mark against the dollar would overcome foreigners’ fears, and the European tabloids had moved on to other horrors. Meanwhile, a young mother was fatally shot outside her daughter’s Bible class in suburban Los Angeles and two college girls were found slain in the Bronx. The nation’s epidemic of violence against its own citizens seemed destined to continue, in Florida and everywhere else.
